Imagination in philosophy - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Kukkonen, Taneli
Leiden
Brill
(1,345 words)
In Arabic philosophy , the imagination is customarily treated in the Aristotelian framework of psychic powers or faculties (quwan). Imagination is one of the inner senses (al-ḥawāss al-bāṭina) , those capacities that synthesise the evidence collected by the five external senses into a unitary field of perception permitting coherent belief and action. As an embodied operation performed by the sensory soul, one that is localised in the brain according to the Galenic medical tradition, imagination belongs to animals as well as humans. However, because Aristotle contended that human rational thought